Re: Popular Lovers by wilco	4-Dec-05/2:59 AM
The second stanza is good, but not really a sentence. The last line should be that she's the romantic or you're not romantic. You're not the one who thinks the wine looks like Jesus.
Re: Shoebox Thoughts by BrandonW	4-Dec-05/3:00 AM
It's a good story. Haikus are overrated. You should expand this.
Re: Through the channel by amanda_dcosta	4-Dec-05/3:05 AM
I am a big fan of rhyming free verse, but think you might (1) enjamb more, like you did well in the first three lines of the fourth stanza, (2) not use "amidst" for something singular like "tide", (3) scent's, not scents', (4) tighten up your message and phrasing just a little. Welcome to poemranker!
Re: how did i forget that i have to go to work? by hendrimike	4-Dec-05/3:16 AM
"we cringed with the rhapsody"? Frost famously said he'd sooner play tennis with the net down than write poetry without rhyme or meter. He respected good free-verse writers, but he himself wouldn't know what to say without some structure and limitation guiding him. Frost, though, had to bust his ass to make rhyme and rhythm work for him, rather than the other way around. I believe there are at least a dozen things in this poem you wouldn't have normally said except for the rhyme. I admit, sometimes the weird connections you make in rhyme are magical, sublime, spontaneous. But had/dad and heart/start/part are not those times. I don't suggest writing free verse. I'm suggesting working harder on your rhymed verse.
Re: how did i forget that i have to go to work? by hendrimike	4-Dec-05/3:17 AM
Sometimes I write a poem without rhyme and then make it rhyme while adding as few new words or new ideas as possible. Maybe that could work for you?
Re: The Bus by Dovina	5-Dec-05/3:53 AM
I can't believe you sevened my Christmas poem, which, incidentally, beats the pants off yours. Is it because I sevened this? Fie!
Re: FIVE LOAVES AND TWO FISH by amanda_dcosta	6-Dec-05/1:36 AM
I had a problem with the first stanza, either because 1. it wasn't really desert then, 2. people are used to desert here (the place where this happened is about two hills over from where I'm sitting now), 3. although metaphorically it's cool, there's no biblical basis for them following him into the desert to the "extreme point of hunger", and/or 4. they're used to pretty extreme hunger. Odds are they were a couple hours walk from the next town (ie, no biggie in Middle Eastern terms) and didn't want to go back for food and miss the preacher. They surely knew they'd be back in their own houses by that night. That said, "The fringes of their deserts were strewn with broken faiths. It was significant that this wrack of fallen religions lay about the meeting of the desert and the sown. It pointed to the generation of all these creeds. They were assertions, not arguments; so they required a prophet to set them forth. The Arabs said there had been forty thousand prophets: we had record of at least some hundreds. None of them had been of the wilderness but their lives were after a pattern. Their birth set them in crowded places. An unintelligible passionate yearning drove them out into the desert. There they lived a greater or lesser time in meditation and physical abandonment; and thence they returned with their imagined message articulate, to preach it to their old, and now doubting, associates." - T.E. Lawrence
Re: Irish Holliday by Dovina	6-Dec-05/1:42 AM
Holiday. One L.
Re: Irish Holliday by Dovina	6-Dec-05/1:45 AM
Bad.
Re: Irish Holliday by Dovina	6-Dec-05/1:46 AM
Sad.
Re: The Incubation by oneglove	6-Dec-05/2:01 AM
http://tinyurl.com/99u6v
Re: YOUR OWN PLEASURE by Zoe	6-Dec-05/2:06 AM
What's up with all these capitalized titles?
regarding some deleted poem...	6-Dec-05/5:46 AM
Who is... Henry James?
regarding some deleted poem...	7-Dec-05/1:24 AM
I'd drop "a gatekeeper finally letting you by, a reason to believe you can actually fly". Some of this is very very good - "reading a list of names and finding your own, reading a list long with adjectives that you’ve never known, and finding you, a bumblebee keeper of sanity". As for the rest, I can't be too hard on something sounding so close to "Midnite Vultures"-era Beck.
Re: almost missed work by calliope	7-Dec-05/1:26 AM
Yeah. Sweet, no lingering impression.
Re: laugh again by skaskowski	7-Dec-05/1:27 AM
A mobius strip is a metaphor. For the rim of a coin, among other things.
Re: Count All the Stars by TLRufener	7-Dec-05/6:05 AM
Let's try another approach. GOOGLE CLICHE COUNT "I sit quietly" = 20,700 "Sit in the dark" = 123,000 "Peering out the window" = 19,300 "Count all the stars" = 623 "Wish on every one" = 190 + "Wish on every star" = 769 "Until you come back" = 126,000 "You left me here" = 33,400 + "You left me alone" = 27,700 + "You left me sad" = 1,830 "You left the world behind" = 249 "Went on to a better place" = 786 "Sit here and wait" = 47,400 "For your return" = 566,000 + "Sit and wait for your return" = 125 "You said you'd come back" = 590 "Take me in your arms" = 120,000 "I sit in/on the windowsill" = 119 "Count all the stars" = 623 "I'm no longer lonely" = 580 "You hold me in your arms" = 20,100
Re: Count All the Stars by TLRufener	7-Dec-05/6:19 AM
In the interest of fairness, here's Caducus' most recent post: "I was your Abilene dream" = 0 + "I was your dream" = 357 "Your rainy Chelsea thoughts" = 0 + "Your rainy thoughts" = 1 "The moisture on your fingers" = 49 "midnight moon Prince" = 53 "I was your IPOD lyrics" = 0 + "I was your lyrics" = 29 "You cantered through suits" = 0 "Breathless even then" = 21 "Before we ever touched" = 390 "You were my serpent" = 1 "My scent of apples" = 0 "Eve slept against my rib cage" = 0 "Knowing the end was near" = 492 "We met in Coventry" = 7 "Both becoming flesh" = 1 "Trains spat diesel" = 0 "Was it a ghost" = 1,160 "Taxi to a Hotel bar" = 4 "Lips betrayed minds" = 0 "Nerves brined my palms" = 0 "Whenever you breathed" = 39 "We left for Texas engaged" = 0 + "We left for Texas" = 195 "Broth of your mothers mouth" = 0 "Stirred the cauldron of my tongue" = 0 "Promises were made" = 107,000 "Ring became a rock" = 0 "Rock became sand" = 10 "Sand became time" = 0 "Time impaled her heart" = 0 "Left me deaf and blind" = 68 "Waiting for a train" = 167,000 "That brings new lovers" = 1 + "Brings new lovers" = 2 "Her wailing ghost" = 3
Re: The Third Fall Of Jesus by amanda_dcosta	9-Dec-05/1:47 AM
Okay, here's the score: I've been trying for ages now to write you some good advice for your poem and I'm tired now and it's driving me crazy. The short of it is, I think you're good and I'm so glad to have you on the site. But I think you need to work a lot harder on the technical side of this poem. Don't misunderstand me, I have no problem with your message or plot. I like it. The telling needs fixing, though. Here are some basic rules that can help guide your rewriting and future writing: 1. Do not use "doth". Especially don't use it just for rhythm, which is what you're using it for. 2. Do not do what we call "inversion"; that is, writing a sentence backwards so you get the rhyming word, usually the verb, last. Some examples of this from your poem are "While this earth with love You save", "The Lord indeed doth promise keep", "Next morning, I, the road did cross", and so on. Obviously, you'd normally say "While you save this earth with love", "The Lord doth keep his promises", and "Next morning, I crossed the road". Yes, it's harder to get the rhyme that way. Poetry writing is hard. Rather than trying to rhyme "love", "promises" and "road" instead, I'd suggest using a technique we call "enjambment" - running the phrase through the end of the line. This way, lines like Next morning, I, the road did cross Surprisingly I had a toss become Next morning, early, while I crossed the road I had a frightful toss. - Or something such. See what I mean? If not, let me know and I'll try again. 3. Pay attention to the grammar and punctuation connecting lines or thoughts. What I'm thinking of is lines like While this earth with love You save On us who doth with anger rave If you write it out as a paragraph you get "While this earth with love you save on us who doth with anger rave." Or, the Lord saves *ON* us. That's not real grammar. It's easy enough to fix, just do like I suggested and write everything out as a paragraph to check. You see pretty quickly that you'd have done better to "for" or "and" instead of "on". 4. What's really going on is that many of your phrases aren't 100% relevant or connected to what you're saying at the time - or rather, you end up fitting them in in a way that's distracting or confusing because you need the rhyme. Sure, they're all connected in that they're about God's love and God really does save all the people who rave and so on, but that make a really untight and confusing poem. Um, I'll say it this way: A lot of your rhymes are too often used to make this a compelling or very precise poem, so there's no reason to fight to keep them. I would start working (and I mean really WORKING) to find new rhymes that don't require distracting or unnecessary ideas, phrases, or grammar inversion. I'm sorry to tell you it's going to be hard, that it'll take a lot of frustration to do well, but I can tell you've got the smarts to pull it off. Don't give up. And don't ignore my advice, please. People are going to tell you this is a great poem. It's a good story and a good Christian message coming from a good heart - I agree. But just like there are people who are only going to look at the story and faith side of this, there need to be people who only look at the grammar and structure side. If you listen to BOTH of us, you're going to come off better. Good luck. If you have any questions, just ask. zodiac
Re: Relief (Ventilation Shaft rewrite) by cyan9	9-Dec-05/3:32 AM
Here's my critique: 1. The first two stanzas aren't real sentences. Don't overuse present participle (ie, "-ing") phrases. It weakens your verbs. Not to mention, you'll forget to make it a sentence. 2. You don't actually have something coming from the charcoal sky, only something that's LIKE cool ash. You need to at least drop "as" and have cool ash coming, or say what it is you're comparing to ash. On a similar note, it takes more than half the poem to get that it's the strangler "glaring" at the drops of steel, or almost half a poem too long. 3. The ending may be true enough, but I can tell you know it's going to get you in trouble with almost everybody. Basically you've placed the entire responsibility for "remedying" the situation on your strangler, who should (it's implied) just be able to decide to change and do it. By extension, that diminishes or frivolizes his complaints and disdain when they don't need to be. Whatever Bush and his smug aristocrat cronies prattle on about it, the reality of the situation is not that all these whining disdainful downtrodden should just one day up and decide to fix themselves and stop whining so much. At least, that may be the reality of the situation, but I'm not going to say it even as a joke. Otherwise, it's good writing. Keep on the ball about your grammar, sentence structure, your message, holding your images together (I just noticed, "calming the very soul" is a very weak and off-message thing to say at that point.) I think you can take my word that I got all your subtle metaphors and such. Yet, I'm going to go with wilco. -8-